The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-12-10
CHRONIC PORES.
BY WILL CARLETON.

iron turnpikes of the nineteenth cen tury. They were for the time being free from care, and appeared to be en- toying themselves, unharassed by any demands of the devil for copy. They had exhausted the delights and vexa- tions of euchre and whist, and fell 10 talking over some of their editorial experiences. The conversation turned upon the different adventures which these protectors of the reading public had undergone with would-be con- tributors.
 "I have no doubt" said one of them, "that have hundreds of subscribers who think they could write a whole paper every day as good as am giv- ing them. Indeed, many have as bad as told me SO. In large number of the minds of humanity the reading of an able article creates desire to write one, the desire hardens into resolve, and very often the resolve into an at- tempt. Then they come to us and want it typed as George Francis Train would say.
 "The worst class of these volunteer contributors that have had to deal with is lot of nice, good old gentle men who have retired from business on competency, and have very little to do nowadays except to help regu- late the affairs of those who are still at work. They naturally feel that a good many things are going wrong in the world, and what is newspaper for if not to get things right? So they put their views into essays of greater or less length, pen them ill very nice, prim, old fashioned hand, sign them 'Veritas,' Fair Play,' y,''Vigilitas,' Sub scriber,' "A Reader of Your Valuable Paper,' 'One Who Knows "A Sui ferer,' "A Public Protector or some thing of that kind, and then bring their long communications to me, and are angry, or, worse still, grieved, if do not give them the entire facili- ties of the establishment. They write on all sorts of subjects, from the presi- dents latest journey to the musical facilities of their neighbor's cats in the night. One old gentleman wanted me to publish his autobiography by in- stallnents; and after that his wife's and after that all his children's. None of them had ever been outside the county where they lived, and, as you may surmise, the manuscript was not wildly exciting. He was very much put out when l declined the article with thanks, and finally resolved to publish it in book"
 "The funeral reporter was the worst case I ever hed," said another editor. "She was a middle-aged lady, who never missed funeral; used to won- der if she didn't sometimes get impa- tient waiting for her own. Only she could not write that up. She brought me a two- o-column account of every funeral she attended, which l had to condense and publish to please her and not offend the friends of the deceased. If I had let her, she would have turned my whole paper into literary ceme- tery. She cared nothing for accuracy as long as she could fill space. She threw wreaths of praise indiscrimi- nately upon every bier. If the dead man had no virtues, she invented some for him, and went right ahead. She badgered every body in the office wild with her mortuary scribblings, and came very near being the death of me, in which case she would no doubt have written my own obituary with her usual placid sort of pleasure. Finally 1 restricted her to four lines per corpse, and she deserted me in a huff and went and contributed to the deaths and death of rival paper"
 "She was not so wearying," said an- other editor, ''as the pretty young poetess who used to glide daintily into my dusty sanctum, with 8 sweet smile on her face and an immense bundle of doggerel under her arm. If sine could have put as much taste and talent into her articles as she did into her attitudes and dresses, Sappho would have been nowhere. Her voice, too, was charming-her manner be- wildering-every thing about her was tiptop, except her poetry. The rhymes were bad, the measure limpid and jumped and kicked over the traces of any metrical harness that ever was constructed. The sentiment was stuff that she never would have thought of airing in prose, for she was good converstionalist and sensible enough till she got into the poetic frenzy.
 II spent hours with her in the semi seclusion of my sanctum trying to convince her that violet did not rhyme with twilight or blossom with much of anything except 'o'pos- sum- and that one of the requisites of a good poetical line was a certain regular number of feet; she would stamp one of her own shapely ones and insist upon it that could edit stories and advertisements, but knew nothing about the afiiatus industry. And so Iwent on admiring her more and her